The Fanciest Japanese Pop-Up in Oakland You Haven’t Heard Of 

During the week, Plenty is an understated little cafe that has become a lunchtime staple for scores of Uptown Oakland office workers. Regulars might come two or three times a week to get their fix of butter-miso salmon, avocado toast or any of a half-dozen Japanese-inflected grain bowls.

In other words: It’s a lovely everyday restaurant. But not exactly someplace you’d think to go for a special celebration.

When I visited Plenty on a Sunday afternoon in August, however, I experienced the most elegant multi-course Japanese meal I’d eaten in many months. The airiest tempura, made with seasonal farmers market vegetables. Pristine sashimi. A tuna’s head picked clean and gelatinized to form the most amazing maguro “head cheese.” 

Dish after artfully plated dish came out, all served in a casual, intimate setting. Every other table, except one, was empty the whole time we were there. It felt like we were dining in a friend’s living room — if said friend’s bar happened to be stocked with a killer sake and shochu collection.

As it turns out, this special prix-fixe lunch pop-up, known as Plenty Plus (or Plenty+), takes over the restaurant just one Saturday and Sunday each month. It comes courtesy of chef Asuka Uchida, whose cooking I’ve gone out of my way to seek since her days at B-Dama, where she made the most comforting pork belly and mizuna hot pot. Later, at the recently closed Fish & Bird Izakaya, her gravy-drenched hamburg steak was my single favorite pandemic-era heat-and-eat dish. Over the past decade, she’s quietly made a name for herself as one of the Bay Area’s most respected Japanese chefs.

Uchida and Plenty owner and co-chef Jack Lin came up with the idea for Plenty+ in 2025, after Uchida had already been working at Plenty for a couple of years. She’d taken the job after suffering a knee injury at Fish & Bird, and the more casual cafe gig offered some respite from the 13-hour shifts she used to work. Lin, who describes himself as Uchida’s “biggest fan,” says the food on Plenty’s day-to-day menu became much more refined as soon as she came on board. But he also felt like it was a waste for such a skilled chef to spend her days only cooking katsu bowls and fried chicken sandwiches. 

“I wanted to showcase her talents,” Lin says.

So, the two began to plan occasional pop-ups on weekends, when the restaurant is normally closed. Lin gave Uchida full creative control over the more upscale prix-fixe meals (currently priced at $80 a person). She builds each month’s menu out of seafood that’s in season at Tokyo’s Toyosu Market and whatever produce catches her eye at the Old Oakland farmers market. 

“I never make the same dish twice,” Uchida says. “It’s my feeling every time.”

During my lunch visit, the meal started with a trio of cold dishes. There was toothsome Isaki (chicken grunt) sashimi topped with sweet cherry tomatoes and a slurry of numbing sansho pepper. There was an extra-jiggly version of chawanmushi crowned with sweet, peak-season Hokkaido uni. My favorite was the aforementioned head cheese — a thunder blast of earthy umami with squishy, pleasingly gelatinous bits from the fish’s eyes.

Every dish had some element of surprise and delight. The second course was probably the most texturally interesting bowl of miso soup I’ve ever eaten, loaded with spongy taro stems, a super-slippery variety of seaweed and the wispy tendrils of a kabocha squash plant. 

For the entree, Uchida served her take on a tempura rice bowl, or ten-don. Instead of your standard shrimp or sweet potato tempura, the bowl was built around interesting seasonal vegetables: beef and pea shoots, sweet manganji peppers stuffed with Gulf shrimp, and pork tenderloin wrapped around a stack of green beans and eggplant. We marveled at the deep-frying precision that allowed us to bite cleanly through each crisp bundle of meat and vegetables. 

Here in the Bay Area, most Japanese restaurants tend to specialize in clearly defined categories of dishes — the tempuras and sushi rolls and assorted grilled skewers. But even as Uchida works within those same basic frameworks, the cooking at Plenty+ feels more modern and idiosyncratic, like what you’d find at a little unmarked izakaya you might stumble upon in some alleyway in Japan.

On Plenty+ days, Lin plays the part of “server and glorified dishwasher,” as he puts it. But the service, too, is part of what makes the meal feel so special and intimate. Lin says they intentionally stagger their reservations so there are no more than a couple of tables at a time. Every time he dropped off a dish for us, he’d spend several minutes offering detailed commentary about the provenance of the ingredients (e.g., the young ginger you can only procure at the farmers market at 5 a.m.) and the specific precepts of cooking wizardry deployed. “Take the shiso leaf and slap it in your hand before adding it to the cocktail,” he instructed us at one point. 

It’s the kind of narration you expect at a fine dining restaurant — but in a jeans-and-hoodies kind of setting and, while not inexpensive at $80 a person, a much lower price point than what you’d pay for a comparably delicious, labor-intensive tasting menu at a fancier Japanese restaurant. Lin says they’re able to keep the price relatively low because he and Uchida are the only ones who work the pop-ups. 

Plenty+ takes place roughly one weekend a month, Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m., at Plenty (1825 San Pablo Ave., Oakland). The next edition will be on Oct. 10 and 11. The current price is $80 per person; advance reservations are required.